Unnatural Selection

EIGHTEEN

The next morning Kozlov, true to form, announced it was back to work for the consortium, starting with the usual working breakfast, so Gideon walked down the hill and into Hugh Town for something to eat. By now he looked forward to a couple of those D-shaped Cornish breakfast pasties to start the day and would miss them when he got back home. Egg McMuffins were fine, but nothing like these supremely dense, tasty things that sank to your stomach like so much lead and continued to warm you for hours.

Late the previous afternoon he had met with Clapper for the distasteful purpose of telling him about the numerous antipathies that Villarreal had aroused among the consortium Fellows. Clapper, tired and preoccupied, had seemed unimpressed, but that was his affair. Gideon was simply glad to have the task behind him. Today he would be pleased to get back to his own element: bones.

When he came out of the cafe and turned toward the station he noticed that the fog had abated a bit. Not thinned, but shredded here and there, like torn curtains, so that there were sporadic glimpses of the sound and even the outer islands between thick pillars of whitish-gray. It was like the occasional, shadowed sight of earth you got looking down from an airliner through heavy, broken clouds. He found that being able to see more than a few feet, even intermittently, raised his spirits, so that when he opened the door of the station he was whistling.

Clapper, sitting in Robb’s office, cradling a mug of coffee in one hand and holding a cigarette in the other, was looking happy, too, and much restored. “Constable, you made a damned mockery of the majesty and stateliness of Force!” he was bellowing at Robb, but he was laughing. Robb looked cheerfully mock-sheepish.

Clapper waved Gideon in cordially. “Ah, Gideon, a pleasure to see you. Now what do you suppose this fellow has done to so arouse my ire?” he asked, jerking a thumb at Robb. “Tell him, Constable.”

“I’m not really sure, sir,” Robb said to Gideon. “Near as I can tell, the sergeant is upset because I donned contaminant-restrictive headgear at the crime scene, as I was taught to do at-”

“Contaminant-restrictive headgear!” Clapper howled. “I’m sitting there minding my own business, interviewing Mrs. Bewley, and I turn around and glance out a window, and there in the passageway, I see a ’orrible sight-Constable Robb, this very Constable Robb, prowling about with a shower cap, a plastic bloody shower cap, on his head! Next thing, I expected to see him in a tatty bathrobe and bedroom slippers.”

“Sarge, they told us at school-”

“And he had the effrontery to offer one to me as well!”

“Sarge, the reason-”

Clapper shushed him affably. “I know, lad, I know. I’m just having you on. You go ahead and do it if that’s what they taught you. But please, not in my presence. Gideon, get yourself some coffee and come join us, why don’t you? I met Mrs. Oliver yesterday. Delightful woman.”

“She told me,” Gideon said from the other cubicle, pouring coffee into the same mug he’d used the day before and wishing he’d remembered to rinse it. “She thought you were delightful, too. ‘He was a lamb’ were her exact words.”

“A lamb,” Robb said to the ceiling, “I bet that’s a first.”

“Au contraire, mon ami,” Clapper said, leaning expansively back in his chair, one thick, hairy forearm hooked over it, then switching to an atrocious French accent: “Eet ees zat I hear zis constantlee.” For a guy with two death investigations on his plate-Joey Dillard’s and Edgar Villarreal’s-and a professional staff of exactly one, he was looking very much at his ease.

“I have something for you,” he said as Gideon returned with his coffee. He waved a few sheets of paper. “Yesterday I put in a call to my fellow copper in Talkeetna, Alaska, and asked if he’d be kind enough to send over what they had on the death of Edgar Villarreal, the gentleman supposedly eaten, and subsequently deposited, by a bear a couple of years ago. Here it is. Not very much of a case file. Police report, police surgeon’s report-both quite brief-and a photograph of the remains, none too clear. They scanned them into the computer and e-mailed them, and there they were, waiting for us this morning.”

“Ah.” Gideon dropped into the empty chair, put his mug on the desk, and took the printouts with considerable interest. The police report covered the same ground as the story in the International Herald Tribune: remains discovered in a bear den, identified as human by one Dr. Leslie Roach, consulting police surgeon, and assumed to be those of Edgar Villarreal, missing from his nearby base camp for the previous two years. The surgeon’s report added little: “Forty bone fragments were recovered, the largest measuring approximately four centimeters and most less than five millimeters. A virtually complete second phalanx of a human thumb, measuring three centimeters, was found, as was a five-centimeter rib fragment. Other fragments were too small and splintered to be conclusively identified.”

Gideon turned to the color photograph of the remains, which had been spread out on a table, first having apparently been cleaned. The picture was either fuzzy to begin with, or had been much degraded in the scanning process. But it was clear enough for his purposes. He placed his finger on one of the bones in the photo, the only complete one. “This thumb phalanx?” he said.

“Yes?” Clapper and Robb responded.

“It’s from a sheep, maybe a goat.”

“Goats have thumbs?” Robb asked.

Gideon couldn’t help laughing. The thing was, Robb was so earnest. “No, but they have breast bones-sternums-and this is the manubrium, the top segment of a sternum. And this…” He indicated another bone in the picture. “And this would be the rib fragment he talked about. He’s right enough about that, but it’s way too flattened to be a human rib. It’s from a quadruped too; probably the selfsame unfortunate sheep, would be my guess.” With a gesture, he took in the entire photograph. “There’s nothing else I can be sure of. This one might be part of a tail vertebra, but that’s about it. Definitely nothing to suggest anything other than a quadruped, a bovid. Well, maybe a couple of little mole or gopher bones, or something like that, mixed in there too. Ferret, maybe. More than one meal here, I’d say. No reason to think any of it’s human.”

Clapper was expelling smoke from a cigarette and shaking his head. “You’d think a police surgeon would know the difference between a goat and a man.”

“Well, you know,” Gideon said, finding himself again defending the medical profession, “once he’s out of school a physician never sees a bone all by itself, out of context- which I do all the time. And there are no courses in medical school that teach comparative skeletal anatomy. Why would they?”

The same was true for dentists, Gideon knew. His own dentist, in whom he had complete confidence when it came to his own teeth, had once telephoned him in some distress to say he thought he’d found a human infant’s mandible in a roadside ditch. It had turned out to be the mandible of a young dog. And when it came to police cases, another factor was at work as well. When the cops walk into your office all excited about the suspicious bone or tooth they’ve brought with them, there is always a subtle but substantial pressure on you, mostly self-induced, to tell them what they’ve told you they think it is.

“Anyway, I don’t really think you can blame the guy,” he finished.

Clapper didn’t agree. “The Alaska State Police ought to get themselves another police surgeon, that’s all I have to say. Or at least hire on a physical anthropologist when the occasion arises.”

“No argument there.” Gideon put down the photograph and picked up his mug. “How’s the Dillard investigation going?”

Clapper responded with a concise summary. The work at the scene was done, as were the initial interrogations, but they knew little more than they’d known yesterday. Quite a lot of evidence had been collected and bagged at the scene and was awaiting a change in the weather that would permit it to be sent to the lab in Exeter. But whether or not they were dealing with a homicide they were having a hard time determining.

The matter was complicated, as Gideon would understand, by a number of factors. First, Joey had been in the habit of enjoying a late-evening smoke out on the catwalk, and all agreed that he had had more Pimm’s Cup than was good for him at dinner (they expected a more exact finding on that from Dr. Gillie shortly). Was it possible that the deceased, his coordination muddled by drink, had accidentally fallen over the railing, which was, indeed, dangerously low? The possibility had to be allowed for. Moreover, the only injury Dr. Gillie had found in his on-the-scene examination, aside from some contusions and lacerations, had been the massive damage to Joey’s head, and the problem with that kind of complex trauma, according to the doctor, was that it was next to impossible to determine whether it was entirely the result of a simple fall or might involve something more sinister, such as a blow or blows. It was hoped that the autopsy would shed some light on the cause of death, but-

“You know, I’m not so sure about that,” Gideon murmured.

Clapper’s eyebrows went up. “About…?”

“About not being able to tell whether the head injuries came strictly from a fall, or something else was involved. I mean, I don’t want to second-guess Dr. Gillie, and I never even saw Joey’s body, so I may be all wet, but all the same, there are some criteria that can be used to differentiate between various kinds of blunt-force trauma-”

But Clapper’s attention had wandered. “Well, yes, that’s interesting. I’ll put you in touch with Davey Gillie and maybe you can help him out there.” He shot a look at his watch. “Kyle, are you ready to go?”

“Ready and eager, sir.”

“We’re off to the castle for another round of interviews,” Clapper explained to Gideon. “Got some new questions for them today.”

The phone cheeped. Robb picked it up. “Isles of Scilly Police Station, good morning,” he said and quickly straightened up in his chair. “Yes, sir. I understand. Of course, sir.” He covered the mouthpiece.

“Exeter,” he said to Clapper.

Clapper made a disgusted noise. “What do they want?”

“They want to talk to you. It’s Detective Chief Superintendent LeVine.”

“Tell him I’ll call him back.”

“Um, Sarge, he sounds like he’s not in the mood to wait. It’s a conference call; they’ve got somebody else on too.” He hesitated. “It’s about Joey Dillard.”

Clapper’s big hands clamped on the arms of his chair as if he thought they were the necks of two detective chief superintendents. “Damn his eyes,” he growled, pushing himself to his feet and stomping to his office, the door of which he slammed shut behind him.

“He’ll be right with you, sir,” Robb said brightly. He listened until he heard the phone in Clapper’s office being picked up, then replaced the receiver. “This may be bad,” he said.

“Why, what is it?”

“Well, the other person on the blower is the Force pathologist down at the hospital at Treliske. He does the postmortems for southern Cornwall. So I’m guessing he’s going to be autopsying Dillard’s body after all, which would seem to mean headquarters is going to scupper our investigation and take the case back themselves.” He gestured with a tip of his head toward the window behind him. “The fog’s dissipating pretty fast. They might be able to fly in their mainland detectives now.”

“That’s not going to make your boss very happy.”

“It’s not going to make me very happy either,” Robb said. “Excuse me.” He picked up the phone again. “Isles of Scilly Police Station, good morning. Oh, hello, Mrs. Hob-good. No, I’m afraid we haven’t found Eloise yet. Yes, of course we’re actively searching. No, of course we haven’t given up hope, it hasn’t even been a full day yet. We’ll find her, you’ll see. Don’t we always? Oh, definitely, we’ll let you know the moment we do. Don’t you worry, now.”

“Runaway kid?” Gideon asked when Robb turned to him again.

“Runaway duck. She keeps her as a pet. Won’t use a leash. Loses her a couple of times a month. I’ll swing by the wastewater treatment plant this afternoon. Eloise always turns up there to root around after a day or two. I’ll pile her in the van and drive her home.” He grinned ruefully. “What was that again about the majesty and stateliness of the Force?”

They hadn’t been able to hear Clapper’s voice from his office, but they had no trouble hearing the telephone slam into its cradle, and then the squeal of his chair rolling back. They looked at each other, the same question on their minds. When the door opened, who was going to come through it, Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde?

It was Dr. Jekyll, smiling and complacent. “Well, that was interesting.”

“They don’t want the case back?” Robb blurted.

“‘Want’ and ‘get’ are two different things,” Clapper said, returning to his chair and his coffee. “I told them to shove it. I’m the case investigator and I intend to continue being the case investigator, and if I need any of their bloody help I’ll bloody well ask for it.”

Robb’s jaw dropped. “You told Detective Chief Superintendent LeVine to… to…”

“Look, lad,” Clapper said kindly, “you have to understand the way these things work. I’m still a bit of a, shall we say, a legendary figure there, despite a few problems in my latter days. People are reluctant to get into a row with me, especially the detective chief superintendent. Teddy LeVine is fifteen years my junior in age and six years my junior in seniority. He’s never made Officer of the Year, and he has no decorations for valor, and when I really assert myself-which I haven’t done now for many a day-when I put my foot down, young Teddy is not the man to stand up to me. With a few face-saving mutterings about making sure to keep the computer log up to date, he withdrew from the fray. The case is mine. Ours.”

From someone else it would have been hyperbole, but Gideon had the impression Clapper was telling it as it was, without any self-inflating embellishments.

“Now the one thing I can use their assistance on is with the postmortem. Nothing against Davey Gillie, of course, but the man would be the first to admit that he’s not forensically trained. Since Teddy has already arranged for an autopsy with the Force pathologist at Treliske, I’ve let that stand. A helicopter is on its way to pick up the body even as we speak. Kyle, you’ll want to get hold of Davey right now and tell him to keep his bloody hands off the corpse.”

Robb immediately got on the telephone while Clapper clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, savoring his victory and the job ahead.

“Just in time, Sarge, they say the body’s already on the autopsy table. Dr. Gillie’s about to get started.”

“Well, tell him to stop where he is and get the body bagged up. Have him send off whatever he’s written up, too. Oh, and see that a copy of our report goes out to Treliske along with the body as well.”

Clapper, content and serene, leaned back and re-clasped his hands, but suddenly sat up straight and smacked his forehead. “Gideon, I forgot, I’ve left the pathologist hanging on the blower. He asked to speak with you. You can take it in my office, line one, if he’s still there.”

“With me? About what?” Puzzled, Gideon got up.

“He didn’t say. I happened to mention your being here, and he said would that be Dr. Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective, and I said yes, and he said, may I speak with the gentleman, and there the matter stands.”

In Clapper’s office, Gideon leaned over the desk to punch line one and picked up the phone.

“This is Gideon Oliver. Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Not at all, not at all!” a bluff, jolly voice declared. “How are you, old friend?”

The voice was only vaguely familiar. “I’m sorry, I don’t-”

“This is Wilson Merrill!” the voice cried, after which there was an expectant pause.

It took Gideon a second to make the connection, but when he did, it was with real pleasure. “Wilson!” he said. “How good to hear your voice. Do I understand that you’re the Cornwall and Devon pathologist now?”

“Indeed, yes. My aged mother lives in Falmouth, and Lydia and I are happily settled here now. I left the Dorset Constabulary two years ago. We had some fun there, didn’t we? Remember Inspector Bagshawe?”

Gideon remembered, all right. In the annals of successful police bogglement, the experience with Detective Inspector Bagshawe of the Dorset CID was at the top of his list. Gideon had been staying in the coastal village of Char-mouth in connection with an archaeological dig nearby, and a rotted corpse had turned up in the bay. Merrill, who knew Gideon by reputation, had been responsible for the autopsy. He had asked Gideon to attend, which Gideon, who hated autopsies-especially on corpses well along the road to putrescence-had reluctantly done. As it turned out, there was so little soft tissue to work with that Merrill had simply turned the remains over to him to see what could be gotten from the skeleton. In less than an hour’s time, Gideon had emerged from the autopsy room with his conclusions.

The unidentified body, he told Merrill and the supercilious (until then) Bagshawe, was that of a large motorcycle-rider in his mid-thirties who also, by the way, happened to be a left-handed baseball pitcher (not a cricket-bowler, a baseball pitcher!). Might that possibly be of some help in identifying him?

“Fun” is not something that is generally associated with forensic anthropology, but this was surely as close to fun as it ever got. Bagshawe’s big, curving cherrywood pipe had actually fallen from his mouth and clattered to the table, scattering ash and tobacco shreds. And the delighted Merrill couldn’t have been more pleased. He’d come near to embracing him.

“You bet I remember,” a laughing Gideon said now. “Wilson, it’s really nice of you to say hello. You know, I’m not exactly sure where Treliske is-”

“It’s a neighborhood in Truro, really.”

“Well, I don’t really know where Truro is either, but-”

“Just up the road from Trelissick,” Wilson told him unhelpfully.

“-but maybe we can get together before I leave. It’d be nice to-”

“I didn’t want to speak to you merely to say hello, old man.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. I want to invite you to the postmortem! Lend a hand, don’t you know.”

He made it sound as if he’d just invited Gideon to a private reception at the White House. It was Gideon’s experience that forensic pathologists in general were a happy, outgoing crew, but he had never met another one quite as exuberant as Wilson Merrill, or one who found so much challenge and fulfillment in the grisly work that took place on the slanted metal tables. But for the notoriously squeamish Gideon, watching a human body get debrained and disemboweled to conduct a postmortem had about as much allure as watching one get dismembered to conceal a murder; namely, zero. And “lending a hand” made it less than zero.

“To the postmortem?” Gideon said, trying for surprised delight. “Well, I really appreciate that, Wilson, and of course I’d like to come but, I’m not sure how I’d get there-”

“No problem there, Gideon! The helicopter should be arriving at St. Mary’s any time now for the body. You could ride back here with it.”

“Umm… well, I’d like to, of course, but I do have some things to do here-”

“Nonsense. You can spare a few hours. We’ll have you back in St. Mary’s by teatime.”

“Oh. Well, actually…”

“I’ll see you in an hour, then. It will be a treat to work with you again. We’ll have a jolly time of it, you’ll see!”

“I’m looking forward to it, Wilson,” Gideon managed. It wasn’t the first time he’d been overwhelmed by Wilson Merrill.

Or in this case, only partly overwhelmed. He had to admit that he was extremely interested in having a look at those “complex trauma” of Joey’s skull to which Dr. Gillie had referred. It was the process of getting down to the skull that he wasn’t looking forward to.

Back in Robb’s cubicle, he was explaining what the call was about when a clatter overhead drew all three men’s eyes to the window. A red helicopter was descending mantislike toward the open space of Holgate’s Green. “Cornwall Air Ambulance,” it said on the side.

“Your conveyance, I believe,” said Clapper.

“Mine and Joey’s,” Gideon said.